ST4.06 | "A Name to Remember"
JUNE 2026
THEY DONT CALL IT BLOOD GULCH BECAUSE THE SWIMMING IS GOOD
It’s hot again, and the snakes are sunning themselves beneath the juniper tress. This month, we want to feel the heat, so we’re looking for stories set in the desert, and though it may sound like we’re looking for westerns, Louis L’Amour can sit this one out. This month, we’re looking for modern neo-westerns. Make them punchy. Make them hard-bitten. Spill some blood on the sand. Remind everyone that noir and the western have always been kissing cousins, and that the promise of the western has always been a lie, because the west was built on noir.
A NAME TO REMEMBER
by Dustin Triplett
The kid in the passenger seat was bleeding onto a map of Arizona, which felt like the kind of thing that would have meant something to a person with a functioning soul. To me, it just meant I was going to have to buy another map, because the one I had was now a Rorschach test of bad decisions, and the gas station between Quartzsite and nowhere was going to ask exact change for the new one because nobody trusts a man with hundred-dollar bills out here, and rightly so.
His name was Denny. He kept saying it, as if I might forget. Like if I remembered his name, I would be obligated to keep him alive, which is the kind of magical thinking that runs in families and also in my line of work, which is, I should mention, no longer a line of work but more of a hobby I picked up the way other men my age pick up pickleball or anti-Semitism.
“Denny,” he said. “Denny Cordoba. From Reseda.”
“I heard you the first six times, Denny.”
“I just want you to know who I am.”
“That’s a luxury, kid. Knowing who you are. I haven’t known who I am since the Carter administration.”
He laughed, which made the wound in his side make a noise I didn’t want to think about. Wet. A wet laugh out of a wet mouth. There’s a kind of intimacy to driving someone who’s bleeding out next to you. More than sex, sometimes. Sex you can fake. You can’t fake the smell.
The desert at three in the afternoon in July is not a place. It’s a verdict. The juniper trees were doing whatever it is junipers do, which is mostly looking like they’re disappointed in you, and the snakes were under them having opinions, and the sky was that washed-out denim color that means God has stopped paying attention. I’d been driving for two hours, and I hadn’t seen another car since the turnoff. That was deliberate. The road I was on existed mostly as a suggestion. It existed the way my marriage existed by 1998. Theoretically. On paper. If you squinted.
“Where are we going?” Denny said.
“Blood Gulch.”
“That a real place?”
“It’s a place. Whether it’s real depends on your epistemology.”
“My what?”
“Forget it, Denny. Yes. It’s a real place.”
It wasn’t called that on the map. The map called it nothing, because the map didn’t admit it existed. The locals called it Blood Gulch because in 1887 a man named Ezekiel Pratt killed his brother there over a woman, and then in 1923 a bootlegger named Sal Minoso killed three men there over a shipment of Canadian rye, and then in 1971 a hippie commune dissolved there in a manner that local law enforcement described as “spiritually inconclusive,” and then, in 2009, my friend Howard Bloom buried his second wife there, allegedly of natural causes, and the ground around it is, by my count, about sixty percent calcium and forty percent regret. They don’t call it Blood Gulch because the swimming is good. They call it that because every generation of Americans needs a place to put the parts of America they don’t want to look at, and out here, the dirt is cheap, and the witnesses are mostly lizards.
I was bringing Denny there because he had asked very nicely.
That’s not entirely true. He had asked, and then his uncle had asked, and his uncle’s asking came with a manila envelope, and the manila envelope contained an amount of money that approximated what I owed to a man in Henderson, Nevada, who had recently begun referring to me in the past tense. So I said yes. I always say yes. It’s been my problem since 1974, when a girl in a denim jacket asked if I wanted to try something, and I said yes, and the something turned out to be heroin, and the girl turned out to be married to a guy who eventually became a city councilman in Glendale, which tells you something about America, although I’m not sure what.
“My uncle’s gonna kill me,” Denny said.
“Your uncle paid me to bring you here, Denny. That’s a level of foreshadowing even you should be able to parse.”
“He said he just wanted to talk.”
“He always says that.”
“He’s my uncle.”
“And yet.”
The thing about Denny was that he had stolen something. The thing he had stolen was not the eighty thousand dollars his uncle claimed he had stolen. The thing he had stolen was a woman, specifically his uncle’s third wife, a woman named Marisol who had a laugh like ice cubes in a highball glass and who was, at this exact moment, in a Best Western in Kingman, waiting for Denny to come back with a car and a plan and a future. Denny had told me this in the first ninety seconds of our acquaintance, because Denny was twenty-three years old and believed that confession was a form of currency. He had not yet learned that confession is just inventory. You’re telling the other guy what you’ve got, so he knows what to take.
Marisol. I’d known a Marisol once. Not the same one. They never are.
“You’re not gonna let him kill me,” Denny said. It wasn’t a question. He was trying it on, the way you try on a coat in a store, to see if it fits the person you want to be.
“Denny. Look at me. Have you looked at me?”
He looked at me.
“I am sixty-one years old. I have hepatitis C, two ex-wives, a daughter who blocked my number in 2017, and a Toyota Tercel held together with prayer and JB Weld. I owe forty-three thousand dollars to a man who used to be in the Israeli army and is now in a different and worse line of work. Do I look like a man who is going to save you?”
“You look tired.”
“That’s the kindest thing anyone has said to me this calendar year, Denny, and I want you to know that I appreciate it. But no. I am not going to save you. I am going to deliver you. Delivery is what I do. I am UPS for human beings who have made poor decisions.”
He started crying. I let him. The desert is a good place to cry. The desert absorbs it. The desert has been absorbing American tears for four hundred years, and it has not yet reached saturation, which is either a comfort or a horror depending on what kind of day you’re having.
We came over a rise, and there was Blood Gulch, which is to say, there was a wash, and a stand of cottonwoods, and a single doublewide trailer the color of an old bruise, and three pickup trucks, and Denny’s uncle Hector standing next to the trucks in a guayabera shirt the color of cream of mushroom soup. Hector was a small man. Small men in this part of the world are dangerous in ways that large men can’t access, because they’ve had to learn things large men never had to learn. Hector had learned a lot. You could see the lessons on him like rings on a tree.
I parked.
“Don’t get out,” I said.
“What?”
“Don’t get out of the car, Denny.”
“I have to.”
“You don’t, actually. That’s the thing. You have a choice. It’s a small choice, and it ends the same either way, but right now, in this moment, you have a choice, which is more than most people get. Stay in the fucking car.”
He was already opening the door.
This is the part of the story where, if Louis L’Amour were writing it, the man in the cream-colored shirt would do something operatic, and there would be a quick draw, and the bad guy would fall, and the sun would set on a morally legible landscape. But Louis L’Amour was sitting this one out, and what actually happened was that Hector walked up to Denny and hugged him. Held him. Like a father. Denny was bleeding into Hector’s guayabera and Hector was murmuring something in Spanish I couldn’t quite catch but recognized the shape of, the shape of forgiveness, the shape of something that sounded like forgiveness anyway, and then Hector stepped back and one of the men by the trucks shot Denny in the head with a bolt-action rifle, just once, very clean, and Denny went down in the dirt like laundry off a line.
Hector walked over to my window. I rolled it down. The desert came in.
“You did good,” he said. He handed me an envelope. “There’s extra.”
“I don’t want extra.”
“Take it.”
“Hector. I don’t want extra.”
He looked at me for a long moment. Then he leaned in, close enough that I could smell his cologne, which was something expensive and floral that did not belong out here.
“The girl,” he said. “Marisol. Kingman. Best Western. Room two-fourteen. She told him she’d wait for him. She told me she’d wait for him. So now we know what kind of girl she is, and what kind of boy he was, and what kind of man you are, which is the kind that takes the envelope. So take the envelope.”
I took the envelope.
I drove back the way I came. The sun was lower now. The sky was the color of a bruise that was almost done healing. The map on the seat next to me was still wet in places. I was thinking about Marisol in room two-fourteen, watching the parking lot, watching for a car that wasn’t coming, and I was thinking about Hector’s cologne, and I was thinking about my daughter, who blocked my number in 2017 because of a thing I did that I am not going to tell you about because some things are mine, and I was thinking about how when I was Denny’s age I also believed that confession was a form of currency, and I was thinking about the man in Henderson, Nevada, who would now be paid, and how being paid would extend my life by an amount of time that, statistically, I would mostly spend in this car, on roads like this one, doing work like this work, and I was thinking that the desert is honest in a way that almost nothing else in America is honest, because the desert tells you exactly what it is, which is a place where things end, and the only lie out here is the lie you brought with you in the car.
I drove past the turnoff for Kingman.
I kept driving.
That’s the part I want you to know. That I kept driving. Not because it was the right thing. There was no right thing. There was just the road, and the envelope, and the sun going down, and the snakes coming out from under the junipers to feel the warmth of the day going out of the asphalt, which is the only kindness the desert offers them, and which they take, because they’re snakes, and that’s what snakes do.
My name, since you’re asking, is not important. Denny’s was. Denny Córdoba. From Reseda. I’m telling you so you remember.
That’s all any of us get, in the end.
A name, and somebody driving away.
DUSTIN TRIPLETT (on Instagram at @triplettwrites) is an award-winning writer, narrative designer, and screenwriter whose work spans video games, interactive fiction, and prose. He has contributed to video game studios including Owlcat Games, Hip Flask Games, and Crazy Maple Studios, working across English style editing, VO production, narrative design, and branching dialogue. His literary work has appeared in The Reprise, The Modern Artist, engine(idling, 3Elements Review, Ink In Thirds, and One Art (Penn State University), among others. He loves to write about the raw, uncomfortable, and quietly devastating moments that define being alive.